Monitoring systems are used in a variety of applications including monitoring the health of individuals. Conventional health monitoring systems typically include a combination of underlying systems or device components such as sensors, recording systems, and storage units. Software is integrated with the hardware of each device component to aid the communication of data between each device component of the conventional health monitoring system.
These conventional health monitoring systems typically have predetermined hardware and software architectures for each device component. However, if one of these device components is either updated with new hardware or replaced with a different device component, the communication of data is disrupted and the software integrated with the hardware of each device component must be updated to match the new underlying device configuration of the conventional health monitoring system which is time consuming and costly. In some instances, the new underlying device configuration is incompatible or it is impossible to update the software to restore the communication of data and so the entire health monitoring system must be replaced.
In addition, the communication of data within the health monitoring system can be interrupted due to a limitation of the technology such as one device component being out of the operating range of another device component or power source failures. In this situation, the communication of data is retried until it is received or the transmittance is terminated. As a result, the communication of data between the device components is not independent of the underlying health monitoring system infrastructure.
These issues limit the interchangeability and scalability of the device components within the health monitoring system. Therefore, there is a strong need for a cost-effective solution that overcomes the above issues by creating a highly reliable, fault tolerant and scalable health monitoring system that contains a clear communication path between device components that is completely independent of underlying architecture. The present invention addresses such a need.